Mountain R

In an unnamed country, the President of the Republican Council, wanting to “do something big,” strikes upon the idea of building a 1,500-meter high mountain as an inspirational monument to national greatness. Construction of the mountain will reduce unemployment, attract hordes of tourists, and the idea can even be exported for sale to other countries. Mountain R relates the rise and fall of this insane project through the eyes of those involved over several decades: the President whose double-talk sets the plan in motion, a worker who, years later, tells his daughter about the disastrous consequences of the never-completed mountain, and an author commissioned to write a novel about the project. An incisive satire about the dangers of half-witted government officials who use political rhetoric to manipulate the patriotism of their constituents, Mountain R is a humorous yet disturbing allegory quite appropriate to our times.

Elected to the Oulipo in 1983, Jacques Jouet is the author of more than sixty texts in a variety of genres- novels, poetry, plays, literary criticism, and short fiction. Mountain R is part of Jouet’s La République roman, a cycle of novels that also includes Fins (Ends), Une réunion pour le nettoiement (A Meeting for Cleansing), and La République de Mek-Ouyes (The Republic of Myass).